Sci Fi Weekly Gallery Image 30 July 2007

This week's entry in the series is based on "The Scout," by Colin Swift, cover #536 on this page.

Lini halted her steed and drank from her water tube. Four Archeaopteryx wheeled overhead, but obviously in a courtship flight. They hadn't found the missing pilgrim. A wasted hour in the midday rays of Beta Comae Berenices. Ride around Swift Hill and then back to the settlement--

Cols lifted its sleek blue head and peered beady-eyed to the right. Its nostrils snuffled the air and it made a caw-caw-caw-cawwwk sound deep in its throat.

Lini turned her head. "Boy, what do you see?" Her gaze roved the hard packed sand with colors swirled like a marble cake. Her gray plastic baroquehelmet swept a magnetic field through her occipital lobe and subtracted out the heat shimmer. A rippling black shape lay eight hundred meters away on the next slope and she realized the black ripple was the pilgrim's robe in the breeze. The pilgrim lay motionless, face up, on a stratum of sand red-brown like dried blood.